Archives pour la catégorie The idea of progress

Advance or development toward a better human condition – Progress is designed for the good of the greatest number – Different types of progress: social, political, technological, medical… Progress is also an ambivalent concept because it produces constraints and contradictions . Therefore progress is a double-edged sworld. Some invention beneficial at first might end up to be catastrophic for human kind on the long run. When talking about progress you might want to consider its positive but also negative impact on society.

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” George Orwell

Jean-Paul Sartre said, « Words are loaded pistols. »

In the following video, a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt reads, “A good leader inspires people to have confidence in their leader. A great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves.” The quote is a good reminder that leaders must be careful with their words—words can either hurt or heal. Words can inflame hatred or raise spirits. Used wisely, words can unleash the best in others

Many speeches are available on You Tube, and I would recommend the following to illustrate the power of specch: Washington’s farewell, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Winston Churchill’s ‘We Shall Fight,’ Kennedy’s and Obama’s inaugural addresses, and also powerful speeches performed by young teens : Malala, Naomie Wadler, Severn Cullis

It is interesting to study what these speeches have in common to understand what made them so powerful. Aristotle’ s rhethoric on the art of persuasion:

NOTIONS : Seats and forms of power, Idea of Progress, Myths and heroes

Questions around the power of words:

Do words have the power to change our lives?

How do great leaders inspire action?

Words can unite but also divide-

You may also want to use a quote to start your oral presentation (see quotes above) –

In this post, we have studied the power of words through speeches, but since words are everywhere you may want to tackle the topic through another angle : the power of songs (see previous post), the power of the press and how it uses words to catch the reader’ s attention and distort information, the power of commercials, the power of tweets etc…

Artificial Intelligence is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machine that work and reacts like humans.

2) What is an artificial intelligence Neural Networks?

Artificial intelligence Neural Networks can model mathematically the way biological brain works, allowing the machine to think and learn the same way the humans do- making them capable of recognizing things like speech, objects and animals like we do.

3) What are the various areas where AI (Artificial Intelligence) can be used?

Artificial Intelligence can be used in many areas like Computing, Speech recognition, Bio-informatics, Humanoid robot, Computer software, Space and Aeronautics’s etc.

Back in 2015, he also expressed fears that AI could grow so powerful it might end up killing humans unintentionally.

Another recent event on the topic: In the NYT thousands of Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the company’s involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes.

This blog is going to focus on the 4 notions and their definition. First by looking at the notions, you will notice that they all include 2 terms which are linked together by “and” or “of”. (Spaces AND exchanges, seats AND forms of power, the IDEA of PROGRESS, myths AND heroes)

I am going to give you very simple definitions of the notions, but I will advise you to come up with your own definition. A list of topics will also be given but it is the key question (la problematique) which will determine the choice of your documents.

FORMULER UNE PROBLEMATIQUE

CONCRETEMENT UNE PROBLEMATIQUE C’ EST:

Une question ouverte à laquelle on ne répond pas par oui ou par non

Elle est introduite par : How, to what extent, why, etc..

Myths and Heroes

Myths exist in every society, as they are basic elements of human culture. We can understand a culture more deeply and in a much better way by knowing and appreciating its stories, dreams and myths.There are many types of myths such as classic myths, religious myths, and modern myths etc.

A Hero can be a mythological figure, a person who is admired for his or her achievements, a superhero or maybe a role model or an icon. Therefore heroes, just like myths, can be real or fictitious. Heroes are people we can look up to, people who inspire like sport personalities, political figures, entrepreneurs, artists, etc.. Heroes lead, inspire, and entertain the masses.

In our class, we will focus on the topic of Witch Hunting in the USA by asking the following questions : Are witches a myth of the past ? From Witch-hunts and Communist-hunts to Terrorist-hunts Why have witch hunts been a recurrent element in modern American history?

The Idea of Progress

The idea of progress is the idea that advances in technology, science and social organisation can bring about a positive change to our society. These advances help improve our daily lives and give us a better quality of life. Social progress, scientific progress and economic development are usually considered as having a positive effect on our society. However the idea of progress is not progress since there are some cases where this change can have a negative effect too. Very often progress is also accompanied by opposition because society isn’t comfortable with the changes being made (same sex marriage, women’s rights, minority rights). We can ask ourselves whether progress is always positive?

There are many kinds of progress and they can be divided in diverse areas.

Technological progress

The technological advances of the last decades have totally changed our world. For example, the arrival of internet has changed the way we communicate. On the one hand we have access to far more information than before, we can easily communicate across borders, buy new products, be informed about the latest news events, share our opinions about different topics but on the other hand, many people have become addicted to social media and this creates new problems such as depression, isolation, bullying, cyber criminality…..

Scientific progress

Scientific progress has had a direct impact on the improvement of human life. Thanks to advances in medicine we can cure illnesses that could never have been cured in the past. Vaccinations,Antibiotics, painkillers and other medical treatments have helped to improve our general state of health and survival rates. But could there be a point where progress come too far? What should be the importance given to ethics? What about scientific progress in the area of cures for illnesses, cloning, performance enhancing drugs, genetically modified organisms etc?

Social progress

Social progress most often comes about when members of a population feel oppressed, or second-class citizens (women’s rights, civil rights, etc).

Scientific Progress : Science and fiction : Does fiction draw inspiration from science or is it the other way round?

Social progress : Why is India said to be a country of contradiction?

Places and Forms of Power (also called Seats and Forms of Power)

In politics and social science, power is the ability to influence people’s behaviour. In order to live together members of a community accept rules, regulations, laws. This helps to create social cohesion but can also lead to conflicts and tensions. Even when authority seems absolute, there are always counter-powers which question it, aim at limiting its excesses and resist it. Power is also associated with authority and influence and certain places can be associated with the authority – for example the White House and the President of the USA, 10 Downing Street and the British Prime Minister etc..

Examples to illustrate the notion can be:

the power of the media (reality tv, internet v written press)

Financial power (the power of money)

Inequalities between blacks and whites – the fight against oppression and segregation (South Africa, USA)

The Civil Rights movement and political recognition : Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X (can also be linked to the notion of Myths and Heroes)

The power of Art (The Harlem Renaissance – Banksy..)

Cinema and power: how do films influence society? Movie stars using their fame to influence public opinion on certain topics (Leonardo Dicaprio, Schwarzenegger)

The power of education: improving knowledge and education across the world and enabling access to education for all (Malala)

The power of music and the music industry: songs used to change people’s opinions on political subjects (vietnam war, US President, poverty, climate change), pop stars who use their fame to bring about changes in the world (Bono, Bob Geldof, Madonna)

People’s empowerment

We will focus on

Protest songs : How have protest songs fought political power? How have they contributed to social progress? (also to be linked with Myths and heroes because some of these protest songs have become myths – also to be linked with the notion of Idea of progress – how have these songs contributed to social progress?)

Civil Rights: To what extent have African Americans achieved equal civil rights? Are African Americans still second-class citizens? (also to be linked with Myths and Heroes and Idea of Progress) : MLK, Rosa Parks etc… Heroes who have inspired others and contributed to social progress

ART as a form of power : How has the Harlem Renaissance contributed to forge a black identity? (also to be linked to Spaces and Exchanges : The Great Migration to Northern cities – Migration for a better life)

Spaces and Exchanges

This notion deals with the geographical and symbolic areas (spaces) that all societies occupy and the interactions (exchanges) between men and different societies. Our world is built on the exploration and conquest of new spaces. The different cultural, economic, sociological and language interactions have shaped and characterised our modern-day world.

Examples can be:

India : Progress and traditions –

Working conditions (telecommuting, internet)

Globalization (the world has become a small village) – global cities

School and education (social diversity / knowledge) comparison of the different educational systems – the brain drain

The Internet / social networks… a new virtual space ….the advantages and disadvantages of increased access to sites such as Facebook and Twitter -Cyber criminality, identity theft, cyber bullying, internet scams..

the movement of people: Immigration to the UK, to the US, the Brexit

movement across borders (Gap Year) – student exchanges

We will focus on 2 topics :

Global cities: To what extent do migrants contribute to population and economic growth in global cities? why are migrants attracted to global cities?

Migration: The migration of African Americans to Northern cities – In search of a new identity – Reason to migrate – Attraction to urban life.

Panel # 1

The Migration Series

In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just twenty-three years old, completed a series of sixty paintings about the Great Migration, the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. Lawrence’s work is a landmark in the history of modern art and a key example of the way that history painting was radically reimagined in the modern era. Explore the social and cultural nuances of each of the sixty panels in Lawrence’s series here. panel #1 Lawrence opens his sixty-panel series with this image of a chaotic crowd in a train station pushing toward three ticket windows marked CHICAGO, NEW YORK, and ST. LOUIS. Images of train stations, railroad cars, waiting rooms, and passengers weighed down by bags recur throughout the Migration Series; . Each of this trio of cities is the subject of a chapter of Emmett J. Scott’s Negro Migration during the War (1920), one of the first scholarly efforts to come to grips with the huge demographic shifts spurred by the Great Migration. “They left as if they were fleeing some curse,” he writes. Negro Migration during the War was one of the pivotal books that Lawrence read in his extensive preparatory research for his series at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem.

The expression “the color line” refers concretely to the discrimination that divided Blacks and Whites in the United States and which appeared at the end of the Civil War in 1865. The Civil War may have abolished slavery in America but this racial “line” continued to have a profound impact on society.

Three Constitutional amendments were passed to accord African Americans legal status: the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, the Fourteenth (1868) provided citizenship, and the Fifteenth (1870) guaranteed the right to vote.

In spite of these amendments, between 1873 and 1883 the Supreme Court passed a series of decisions that virtually nullified these texts.

Regarded by many as second-class citizens, Blacks were separated from Whites by law and by private action in transportation, public accommodations, recreational facilities, prisons, armed forces, and schools in both Northern and Southern states.

Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage, 1936

Affirmation of Black Identity

The exhibition “The Color Line” looks back on this dark period in the United States through the cultural history of its black artists, the prime target of this discrimination.

The exhibition takes viewers through the civil rights movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and introduces the new millennium with contemporary art work.

About the exhibition :The exhibition pays tribute to the African-American artists and thinkers who contributed, during a century and a half-long struggle, to blurring this discriminatory « colour line ».

The Poetry of Langston Hughes

A central figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s and 40s, Missouri-born Langston Hughes used his poetry, novels, plays, and essays to voice his concerns about race and social justice.

One Way Ticket

I pick up my life, And take it with me,
And I put it down in Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Scranton,
Any place that is North and East, And not Dixie.
I pick up my life And take it on the train,
To Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Seattle, Oakland, Salt Lake
Any place that is North and West, And not South.
I am fed up With Jim Crow laws,
People who are cruel And afraid, Who lynch and run,
Who are scared of me And me of them
I pick up my life And take it away On a one-way ticket
Gone up North Gone out West Gone!

POWER AND SEATS OF POWER –

What role did art play in the quest for equality and the affirmation of black identity in segregated America?(see post on Harlem Renaissance)

The role of these artists was essentially to construct an image of the black person that was different from the one transmitted by racist images, by stereotypes.

These documents (paintings, photos, texts, films) present the struggle of African-Americans for the effective recognition of their rights: . During all these years, artists never stopped pinpointing inequalities, injustices and racism through their art.

Harlem Renaissance, a blossoming (c. 1918–37) of African Americanculture, particularly in the creative arts, and the most influential movement in African American literary history. Embracing literary, musical, theatrical, and visual arts, participants sought to reconceptualize “the Negro” apart from the white stereotypes that had influenced black peoples’ relationship to their heritage and to each other. They also sought to break free of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about aspects of their lives that might, as seen by whites, reinforce racist beliefs. Never dominated by a particular school of thought but rather characterized by intense debate, the movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and had an enormous impact on subsequent black literature and consciousness worldwide. While the renaissance was not confined to the Harlem district of New York City, Harlem attracted a remarkable concentration of intellect and talent and served as the symbolic capital of this cultural awakening.

The background

The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early 20th century and in some ways ushered in the civil rights movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The social foundations of this movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban spaces and from South to North; dramatically rising levels of literacy; the creation of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights, “uplifting” the race, and opening socioeconomic opportunities; and developing race pride, including pan-African sensibilities and programs. Black exiles and expatriates from the Caribbean and Africa crossed paths in metropoles such as New York City and Paris after World War I and had an invigorating influence on each other that gave the broader “Negro renaissance” (as it was then known) a profoundly important international cast.

SPACES AND EXCHANGES -IDEA OF PROGRESS

How has the Great Migration changed the face of New York city ?

What impact has the Great Migration had on US main cities (NEW YORK – CHICAGO) ?

As a result of housing tensions, many blacks ended up creating their own cities within big cities, fostering the growth of a new urban African-American culture. The most prominent example was Harlem in New York City, a formerly all-white neighborhood that by the 1920s housed some 200,000 African Americans. The black experience during the Great Migration became an important theme in the artistic movement known first as the New Negro Movement and later as the Harlem Renaissance, which would have an enormous impact on the culture of the era. The Great Migration also began a new era of increasing political activism among African Americans, who after being disenfranchised in the South found a new place for themselves in public life in the cities of the North and West.

Black migration slowed considerably in the 1930s, when the country sank into the Great Depression, but picked up again with the coming of World War II. By 1970, when the Great Migration ended, its demographic impact was unmistakable: Whereas in 1900, nine out of every 10 black Americans lived in the South, and three out of every four lived on farms, by 1970 the South was home to less than half of the country’s African-Americans, with only 25 percent living in the region’s rural areas.

The renaissance had many sources in black culture, primarily of the United States and the Caribbean, and manifested itself well beyond Harlem. As its symbolic capital, Harlem was a catalyst for artistic experimentation and a highly popular nightlife destination. Its location in the communications capital of North America helped give the “New Negroes” visibility and opportunities for publication not evident elsewhere. Located just north of Central Park, Harlem was a formerly white residential district that by the early 1920s was becoming virtually a black city within the borough of Manhattan. Other boroughs of New York City were also home to people now identified with the renaissance, but they often crossed paths in Harlem or went to special events at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Black intellectuals from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities (where they had their own intellectual circles, theatres, and reading groups) also met in Harlem or settled there. New York City had an extraordinarily diverse and decentred black social world in which no one group could monopolize cultural authority. As a result, it was a particularly fertile place for cultural experimentation.

Context of the movie : It was just 52 years ago that Stanley Kubrick’s legendary satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb hit theaters — but the world was a very different place. The Cold War was at its height, and America was still recovering from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy just two months earlier. It’s into this charged landscape that Stanley Kubrick launched Dr. Strangelove, a jet-black comedy that gave voice to the nerve-jangling paranoia of the era.

Why is Dr Strangelove still relevant today?

There are still a lot of nuclear weapons in the worldIn the decades since Dr. Strangelove’s release, there have been significant reductions in warheads across the globe. But more than two decades after the end of the Cold War, the world’s combined nuclear arsenal remains disturbingly high. It’s estimated that some 17,000 warheads are currently stockpiled around the globe, of which around 1,800 remain on high alert, ready to be fired at a moment’s notice. In addition, the government continues to plow billions of dollars into projects such as the so-called « Star Wars » missile defense system (an idea first dreamt up by the Reagan administration in 1983).

These days, of course, Russia isn’t the most troubling atomic aggressor; there are emerging nuclear powers, like Iran and North Korea. But while the players have changed and public paranoia has diminished, the Doomsday Clock remains rooted at five to midnight — a reminder that mankind is arguably as close to mutually assured destruction as we were at the time of Dr. Strangelove’s release.

The technology of warFrom doomsday machines to a Jumbotron-filled war room with a strict « No Fighting » policy, technology is at the heart of Dr. Strangelove’s dark narrative — particularly when it malfunctions. One of the film’s central themes is the deeply flawed technology of war, which puts real power in the hands of fallible machines, not to mention armchair generals holed up in windowless bunkers thousands of miles away from the front lines. Fast forward 50 years, to an age where drones have become commonplace, and you don’t have to look hard for a parallel.

Human fallibility« I admit the human element seems to have failed us here, » says Dr. Strangelove’s General Turgidson, played by the brilliant George C. Scott. It’s a sentiment that echoes throughout Dr. Strangelove. The mental illnesses, testosterone-fuelled saber-rattling, and downright stupidity of a few high-level players can set humankind on a course to nuclear obliteration. Half a century later, the human race is no less fallible — and whatever your politics, you need only to turn on the news for to get a stark reminder of mankind’s continued propensity for self-destruction.

A culture of fearNo, the United States is no longer immersed in a Cold War with « Rooskies » or « Commies » who are intent on « impurifying our bodily fluids. » But the culture of fear that drives in Dr. Strangelove is still an ever-present part of our lives. From the ongoing « War on Terror » to chronic tensions with North Korea, unseen enemies continue to drive public paranoia in a way that makes Dr. Strangelove darkly relatable. In the years since its release, collective fears about ideological enemies have continued to fuel policy-making, from the invasion of Iraq to the expansion of the surveillance state.

Government distrustDr. Strangelove goes out of its way to undermine each and every authority figure that it puts on screen: Psychologically unstable generals, drunken world leaders, and armchair commanders whose opinions are directly informed by agenda-driven think tanks. Kubrick’s film shows us a world where there’s an entirely justified suspicion of the people whose fingers are on the triggers. If that sounds familiar, that’s probably because it hasn’t changed much: If recent reports of record levels of government mistrust are to be believed, things are worse than ever.

POWER in Dr Strangelove

First, we’ve got the deadly power of nuclear bombs and the Doomsday Machine. We’ve also got political power, which in this story isn’t very effective. There’s Strangelove’s demented scientific power. You’ll notice that women are totally absent from this discussion of power. That’s because they didn’t have any, except the power to drive men crazy with lust. The idea of a woman in the War Room or the White House would have been completely off the radar back then.

Do you think women would be less likely to let the nukes fly?

Questions about Power

Who would you say is the most powerful character in the film? The most powerless?

How is power shown as a force of destruction in the film? Is it ever shown as a positive force?

What does the film say about President Muffley’s power?

Chew on This

Take a peek at these thesis statements. Agree or disagree?

Technology is the only « character » in the film with any real power.

Dr. Strangelove depicts powerful men as clowns to highlight the fact that they’re ultimately weak on multiple levels.

More questions about power:

Is Power Good Or Bad?
There are so many ways to use power that it is quite easy for it to take over and actually do more harm than good in society.

Here is a link which explains the American Dream in simple terms. It will also give you key questions for the exam.

The American dream –

A myth or a reality?

What are the main values that the American Dream stands on? Are they still shared today?

Now watch a video of the recently elected Donald Trump and his intention to renew the American Dream. ¨Trump pledges to renew the American Dream¨ : For Trump, the dream is obviously a reality which is no longer true but can be brought back. The dream can become reality if you vote for him!

To what extent was the American dream of the settlers fulfilled in the XX century? What about today?

Another video on the American Dream : Requiem for the American Dream. An interview of one of the most prominent intellectual of the XX century : Noam Chomsky. For Chomsky the American Dream has always been a make belief. Chomsky explains how concentrated wealth creates concentrated power, which legislates further concentration of wealth, which then concentrates more power in a vicious cycle. He lists and elaborates on ten principles of the concentration of wealth and power — principles that the wealthy of the United States have acted intensely on for 40 years or more.

The video can be seen on youtube –

Great document to illustrate the notion of power.

The film concludes with a call to build mass movements for change. The United States still has a very free society, Chomsky advises. A lot can be done, he tells us, if people will only choose to do it.

Again this can illustrate the notion of power and the topic of counter power : See my post on Power and counter power –

To finish let´s remember John Lennon´s song :

JOHN LENNON LYRICS

« Power To The People »

Power to the people

Power to the people

Power to the people, right on

Say you want a revolution
We better get on right away
Well you get on your feet
And out on the street

Singing power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people, right on

A million workers working for nothing
You better give ’em what they really own
We got to put you down
When we come into town

Singing power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people, right on

I gotta ask you comrades and brothers
How do you treat you own woman back home
She got to be herself
So she can free herself

Singing power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people, right on
Now, now, now, now

Oh well, power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people, right on

Yeah, power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people, right on

Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people, right on

Completely excluded from the fine ideals of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, African Americans spent the next two centuries searching for political, intellectual and cultural empowerment in American society. Prior to the 1920´s African Americans were depicted as the goodhearted and obedient ¨negro¨ (Uncle Tom´s cabin) or the uneducated farmer. With the Harlem Renaissance a new image of sophisticated and intellectual Afro Americans began to emerge. The harlem Renaissance was more than an artistic movement ; it helped lay the foundation for the post-World War II phase of the Civil Rights movement.

A document from the US History website to help you understand the origin of the Harlem Renaissance, but also a document which could be added to the notion of Spaces and Exchanges – Topic: migration – why do people migrate? Another example of massive relocation in search of a better life.

The Great Migration, or the relocation of more than 6 million African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West from 1916 to 1970, had a huge impact on urban life in the United States. Driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many blacks headed north, where they took advantage of the need for industrial workers that first arose during the First World War. As Chicago, New York and other cities saw their black populations expand exponentially, migrants were forced to deal with poor working conditions and competition for living space, as well as widespread racism and prejudice. During the Great Migration, African Americans began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting economic, political and social challenges and creating a new black urban culture that would exert enormous influence in the decades to come.

Context and Causes of the Great Migration

After the post-Civil War Reconstruction period ended in 1876, white supremacy was largely restored across the South, and the segregationist policies known as Jim Crow soon became the law of the land. Although the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had been officially dissolved in 1869, it continued underground after that, and intimidation, violence and even lynching of black southerners were not uncommon practices in the Jim Crow South.

Did You Know?

Around 1916, when the Great Migration began, a factory wage in the urban North was typically three times more than what blacks could expect to make working the land in the rural South.

After World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, industrialized urban areas in the North, Midwest and West faced a shortage of industrial laborers, as the war put an end to the steady tide of European immigration to the United States. With war production kicking into high gear, recruiters enticed African Americans to come north, to the dismay of white Southerners. Black newspapers–particularly the widely read Chicago Defender–published advertisements touting the opportunities available in the cities of the North and West, along with first-person accounts of success.

Great Migration: Life for Migrants in the City

By the end of 1919, some 1 million blacks had left the South, usually traveling by train, boat or bus; a smaller number had automobiles or even horse-drawn carts. In the decade between 1910 and 1920, the black population of major Northern cities grew by large percentages, including New York (66 percent) Chicago (148 percent), Philadelphia (500 percent) and Detroit (611 percent). Many new arrivals found jobs in factories, slaughterhouses and foundries, where working conditions were arduous and sometimes dangerous.

Aside from competition for employment, there was also competition for living space in the increasingly crowded cities. While segregation was not legalized in the North (as it was in the South), racism and prejudice were widespread. After the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially based housing ordinances unconstitutional in 1917, some residential neighborhoods enacted covenants requiring white property owners to agree not to sell to blacks; these would remain legal until the Court struck them down in 1948.

Rising rents in segregated areas, plus a resurgence of KKK activity after 1915, worsened black and white relations across the country. The summer of 1919 began the greatest period of interracial strife in U.S. history, including a disturbing wave of race riots. The most serious took place in Chicago in July 1919; it lasted 13 days and left 38 people dead, 537 injured and 1,000 black families without homes.

Impact of the Great Migration

As a result of housing tensions, many blacks ended up creating their own cities within big cities, fostering the growth of a new urban African-American culture. The most prominent example was Harlem in New York City, a formerly all-white neighborhood that by the 1920s housed some 200,000 African Americans. The black experience during the Great Migration became an important theme in the artistic movement known first as the New Negro Movement and later as the Harlem Renaissance, which would have an enormous impact on the culture of the era. The Great Migration also began a new era of increasing political activism among African Americans, who after being disenfranchised in the South found a new place for themselves in public life in the cities of the North and West.

Black migration slowed considerably in the 1930s, when the country sank into the Great Depression, but picked up again with the coming of World War II. By 1970, when the Great Migration ended, its demographic impact was unmistakable: Whereas in 1900, nine out of every 10 black Americans lived in the South, and three out of every four lived on farms, by 1970 the South was home to less than half of the country’s African-Americans, with only 25 percent living in the region’s rural areas.

London. (….) Implacable November weather, (…) Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun (…) Foot passengers, jostling one another´s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and loosing their foot.hold at streets corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke) …

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Chapter 2, 1852

It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, whezzing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither (..) Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the city – which call Saint Mary Axe – it was rusy-black.

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friends, 1865.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870), is considered to be one of the greatest writers of the 19th century: He lived in London. The rapidly growing industrial environment of the time served as a bachground to most of his novels : Little Dorrit, David Copperfield, The Adevntures of Oliver Twist. He is famous for his realistic depiction of the poverty and pollution that were generated by the industrial revolution.

The growth of global cities have brought a wealth of culture, linguistic and ethnic diversity, helping to enrich everyday life and open new possibilities of exchange. However, the needs of such dense population have led to serious problems in terms of environment. From the slums and fog of Victorian London to the Great Smog of 1952 and the current issue of traffic pollution, global cities struggle to find solutions to reduce their carbon footprint and improve urban living conditions.

Will global cities find a way to create sustainable environment in the future?